University image, hard skills or soft skills: Which matters most for which graduate students?

We explore the relationships between student satisfaction and its antecedents—perceived value, university image, and perceived quality—from the perspective of employed graduate students from a Spanish technical university. To determine how students were segmented in our structural model, a general model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling and heterogeneity was tested using pathmox analysis. Our analysis indicated that student satisfaction varied according to demographics, university curricula, and job-related variables, resulting in three groupings differentiated by salary and grade point average (GPA): (1) higher-salary graduates, (2) lower-salary/lower-GPA graduates, and (3) lower-salary/higher-GPA graduates. We found student priorities to be as follows: perceived quality of soft skills was important for the higher-salary students, perceived quality of hard skills for lower-salary/higher-GPA students, and university image for lower-salary/lower-GPA students. Our findings contribute evidence concerning the satisfaction of graduates, exemplifying how an apparently representative global model can in fact mask different relationships between constructs due to heterogeneous data, underlining the importance of accounting for heterogeneity when analysing student preferences. Our results would suggest that higher education institutions could consider customizing polices according to student profiles reflecting labour market insertion and proficiency.